Big Breakfast Bao

The fluffiest sausage, egg, and cheese you'll ever get your hands on.

Have You Eaten Yet? Here’s a new recipe from my kitchen to yours that I hope you’ll love! For more recipes, you can pre-order my next cookbook, Chinese Enough or purchase Mooncakes and Milk Bread for all things Chinese Baking!

Hello Hello! I hope you had a lovely weekend!

Who else has the Olympics playing in the background all day everyday? I’m currently watching archery while writing this morning, which is probably why this week’s post is taking longer than normal. I’ve also been obsessed with watching “What I Eat In a Day in the Olympic Village” videos. Oh, to be an elite athlete in Paris with access to an all you can eat buffet! Is the infamous chocolate muffin really that good? Although, I’m a little shocked to find out that there’s a food shortage in the village, because you would think having ample supply of carbs and protein would be a given. Someone fly me out there so I can set up a bao stall and pass out these big breakfast bao! Or so that I can just go into the dining hall and rate everything on a scale of 1-10.

For July’s Bun of the Month I was inspired to make one of my favorite breakfast sandwiches, a sausage egg + cheese, but in the form of a fluffy steamed bun.

Bao = buns. Don’t call it a bao bun, just use one word or the other!

Technically, any bao can be a breakfast bao. When I lived in Beijing I would often stop at a local food stall on my way into the office to pick up a bao or two for an dollar. I can’t speak Mandarin so I would point and try to communicate with hand signals for them to just surprise me. It seemed like I got a different bun each time. One would be stuffed with pickled mustard greens and pork, another would be mushrooms and vermicelli noodles, or simply eggs and garlic chives.

One style of bao that I rarely find but love dearly are dai bao, which literally translates to “big bun”. Dai Bao are huge, like the size of a softball, and stuffed with an egg (or half of one), ground pork, Chinese sausage, and some sort of vegetable or minced mushroom. I’ve had one that also snuck in some chicken, which felt like they were trying to see how many more food items they could tuck into a sphere of dough.